


one whole life recorded in disappearing ink

by hypotheticalfanfic



Series: rogue one collex [4]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Emotional Baggage, Fulcrum, Gen, Multi, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Spies & Secret Agents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-26
Updated: 2018-07-26
Packaged: 2019-06-16 21:06:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15445851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hypotheticalfanfic/pseuds/hypotheticalfanfic
Summary: A man at the end of all things, and the light within him flickers, has flickered, always.





	one whole life recorded in disappearing ink

There will be, he knows in the pit of his gut, no one to mourn his passing. No one who shares his blood remains alive. No one from home would place his name to his face. No one from Fulcrum will avow him. His name, if it is remembered, will be a hushed whisper attached to a ghost. He should probably feel worse about that. Everyone who really knows him will die here on this beach or just inland from it, or is already dead, and who knows, in the end, if it mattered at all, any of it, even a little bit?

He thought, for long enough that it hung on even when all else left, that belief made a man good. That if a man believed in something, anything, fervently and with all he had, it was what made him. Too much blood on his hands after a while, though, and he’d come to see that belief was one more in a long line of ways a man could lie to himself. He didn’t believe anymore, or at least not with all the fibers in him. Or, to be more clear, he didn’t believe in the Cause, capital-C, anymore. Not like he had once.

Jyn believes. His back hurts so much it’s making his vision swim, or maybe they’re tears, or radiation, but she is a blurred beautiful beacon of belief, and he wishes they’d had a little more time. Not even to fall in love, necessarily, although he’s not stupid. He just wishes, sharp like the blade he can feel in his spine, that they’d met a year ago, or two, or ten. That they’d spoken a hundred times about everything and nothing, that he knew her middle name and how she took her caf and what made her sneeze. That she knew him, really knew him. For a moment, as he can feel the licking heat approaching, he starts to tell her. Starts to try and sum up his whole life in whatever he can rattle off before they’re gone, but it’s no use, and he only gets out, “I’m Cassian.”

She hugs him hard. “I’m Jyn,” she whispers in his ear, and it’s the last thing he hears besides her breathing, besides the rush of air. He closes his eyes, pretends for just a moment that it’s not happening, and then the pain in his back radiates to all of him for a split second.

* * *

Once upon a time, in a village on a planet no one would look twice at, a boy was born with a head of dark hair and two teeth. Two mothers, three fathers, and a passel of siblings of many colors and shapes, and Cassian was somewhere in the middle of the noise his whole childhood. Loud, yes, and too hot, and he had to share a pallet with two brothers and a sister, all of whom kicked and snored and sweated in their sleep. But there was love pouring out of every crack. Every harsh word, every hungry night, every too-cold winter: love, all around, like the stories Mama and Mamata and Fa and Papa and Padre all told about the Force, that thing the Jedi had. Love, always, even as ships bigger than Cassian’s whole family’s house settled on their dirt, as people in hard white shells poured out. Love, even as one by one they saw people die or run away, as their home melted around them. Love, even as Mama and Fa and Papa were taken, held somewhere, never spotted again. Love, even as the family dwindled, and when Cassian finally fled, all alone, the last breathing, he felt that love stay behind. Like it was some species that couldn’t have made it on any other world. Like it was anchored to the ground he’d lived on with it, like it didn’t take to space travel.

For some years, Cassian didn’t, either. Took ages, a landborn kid like him, to learn to float, to learn to breathe less, to learn to check every seal and every hatch and every dial a hundred times, over and over, to gain that paranoid certainty that one day something onboard would fail and he would die gasping. He learned to fight in gravities he’d never imagined. Learned to listen and remember everything. Learned to sneak and hide, to shoot and spy, to do what needed to be done. And somewhere deep within him, so darkly covered with the blood his hands drew, was a tiny flicker of that light. Sometimes it flared up, just for a moment. He got used to long silences and too many strangers, to letting people assume whatever they wanted about him. He drank too much, a little, once in a while, and tried very hard not to think about it. He drank too much, a lot, for a few years, and bunged up a job on a water carrier so bad they dumped him. The union couldn’t help him - technically, he thinks he probably wasn’t a member, hadn’t ever paid dues, but he’d kind of misunderstood how that worked anyway, and besides he had taken a drunken swing at his boss, so. Dumped him. Made sense.

Dumped him on Shili, though, a beautiful grassland place, could have been endlessly worse. Here, at least, the air smelled good, and everyone was strikingly beautiful and smart, and the food was all vegetable-and-grain-based and far too spicy, and the local distillers’ guild had a variety of brightly colored deadly dangerous liquors available at convenient prices, and Cassian felt desperately ordinary. Drank too much a while longer until an old Togruta female took him in. He found out later, she’d been keeping an eye out for people like him, floaters, young and clever and heartless. He wasn’t yet twenty, and he could do whatever needed to be done, and he no longer much cared about what happened after that. He carried rocks for weeks, listened to her yammering in half-code about things he had never heard of, and at some point he answered a question in a way she liked, and she’d let him stop carrying rocks. He painted walls and thatched her roof, and she fed him more information, and something in his brain rearranged and he understood it. He could put together bits of rumor into something near enough the facts, and she took note. Sent him to market to buy liquor and snap peas, and asked him to recount every moment when he came back. He’d always had a good memory, and the little Togruta (she told him to call her Soak, but he knew it wasn’t her name) needled and prodded him until he could spout paragraphs of detail, until he did it without thinking, until he remembered everything, all the time, always.

Then she told him her names, her real ones. And she asked if he wanted to learn more. And she took him to a basement under a bar, where half a dozen people with the same careful expressions on their faces sat, nursing bad caf and swapping bits of gossip that might mean nothing at all. Fulcrum liked him right away, and he niched in like he’d been carved for it. He met people with more money than anyone he’d ever met, slept in bigger cabins on better ships than the house he’d been born in, buddied up to people who hated the Empire and everything about it. The flame of that love flickered, dimmed and brightened over and over, and he was someone, doing something. He wasn’t sure if spying, if sabotage, if a blade in a throat when it was needed, if that was what his family would have wanted, but he knew, too, that they were long dead and all he was doing now was whiling away time. He found ways to make it pass.

A pair of twins with bright blue skin kissed him, one on each cheek, and he was deep undercover but the blush that had been his one big tell for his whole life flooded his face, and they laughed, and he felt terribly warm all over for a few days until maintaining his cover required that he ditch them without a word. He’s forgotten their names now, on purpose or because he meets too many people, but he remembers their laughs. Sometimes Fulcrum tells him who to go to bed with, who to corner in a dark alley, who to lavish with affection or use once and discard, and he hates that part. He’d rather slit a throat than seduce someone, and on bad days he wonders if that’s why they ask him to do so. Makes blood more appealing when he considers the alternative, and he’s not stupid, he knows that a knife in the throat is almost always safer than a spell in a bed. Each time, though, he can almost feel that flicker within him gutter, dim, and he idly wonders what will happen the last time he does something he hates for a cause that seems not to care.

Once, some years in, he found himself happy, surprised. It was so seemingly small, so nothing at all, just. A reprogrammed Imperial droid made a joke. It sort of made a joke, something like a droid’s idea of a joke, and Cassian’s assignment was to wipe it and start over, but instead he laughed. A hoarse, barking laugh, his real laugh, not the put-on one he uses with marks and contacts and superior officers. The droid’s voice modulates into something like pleasure, and it tells another, and another, bad jokes but jokes, and Cassian keeps laughing. It has a name, and preferences, and a dry sense of humor that reminds Cassian in an echoey, far-off way of someone he used to know. He keeps the droid around, and eventually people stop looking at it sideways all the time. K2, obviously, is a friend, a real one, probably the only one. K2 doesn’t do human morality, and K2 doesn’t do sex or romance, and Cassian uses the droid as a focal point to keep his horizon steady. Keeps the flame up.

Earlier than that, there’s an endless meeting, and Cassian doesn’t actually need to be here, and no one is listening to or looking at him anyway. He picks at a half-healed scar on the back of one hand, lets the sound fade into a meaningless drone. He hears, soft but unmistakeable, a snort of held-back laughter, and looks up. A young woman in white robes rolls her eyes at an old man, and Cassian chokes down a barking chuckle he’s just barely able to turn into a cough, and she meets his eye and smiles. They grab a drink, after, and he’s younger than her but looks older, and she’s never done the things he’s done but they find seams where they overlap. She likes him, he likes her, and he finds himself on missions with and for her for a good long time. Pretty soon he figures out she’s a princess, and a senator, and a spy, and a mean hand at cards, and a giggly drunk, and he never kisses her - she’s so much taller than him, or maybe it’s the white robes and the knowing smirk that make her seem so -but he dreams about her, sometimes, and feels vaguely ashamed about it.

He spends some time with a few people here and there, makes some connections that don’t seem to be built completely on the implied threat of his existence. In another life he’d think of them as friends. There’s a pilot, sharp jaw and soft lips; a linguist, three eyes and four hands; a triad of amphibious beings who all speak in one melodic chord; he likes them. He tries not to lie to them, not when he can help it. But they’re…The thing is that there is a remove in Cassian, has been since he can remember. A distance. And Cassian’s not afraid, exactly, but there is nowhere near enough incentive for him to risk any more of himself on any altar other than the one that’s already claimed him. He never makes a move he doesn’t already have mapped out, he never says a word without a speech written around it, and he never, ever acts from the gut unless he also has a datapad full of proof that he was doing the right thing.

In the light, here, now, at the end of all things, he laughs a little, a huff of hot painful air into Jyn’s small curved neck, “the right thing.” His mouth’s not working right, he knows he probably slurred, that she couldn’t hear him over the growing roar of wind and destruction. “I tried to do the right thing.” She didn’t hear him, but she felt it, and as he closes his eyes against the radiant beauty of endless pain, he feels her arms tighten around him, the benediction he will never hear. There are, he has just enough time to think, worse ways than this.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Lakeside View Apartment Suite" - the Mountain Goats
>
>>   
> And just before I leave  
> I throw up in the sink  
> One whole life recorded  
> In disappearing ink  
> 


End file.
